In 1596 an eleven-year-old boy called Hamnet Shakespeare died in the English town of Stratford-upon-Avon. Four years later, the boy’s father, William, wrote a play called Hamlet, one of the greatest tragedies of all time. Award-winning writer Maggie O’Farrell focuses her latest novel on imagining the short life of Hamnet Shakespeare and how his death affected his family, including his famous father.
family centre-stage
The novel opens with a description of eleven-year-old Hamnet running through the town of Stratford-upon-Avon. Hamnet’s twin sister Judith is ill and Hamnet knows he must get help urgently. Hamnet tries to find his mother, but she’s out in the fields. Susanna, his older sister, is out in the town, helping to sell gloves; their grandfather is a glove maker. His father William is far away in London where he is a successful theatre director and playwright. When Hamnet’s mother does finally return to the house, she finds Judith with a high fever and a lump on her neck. These are signs of the pestilence, or what is later called the Black Death. Hamnet catches the pestilence from his twin sister and soon has a fever, too. A message is sent to William in London telling him to come home quickly. But it’s too late. When William arrives in Stratford, he finds his son Hamnet has died. Shakespeare’s wife and his mother are already preparing the body for burial.
historical CLUES
Is that really how it happened? Did Hamnet die of the Black Death? It’s impossible to say. Despite Shakespeare’s huge fame, surprisingly little is known about the details of his life, and the circumstances of his son’s death are a mystery. Historical records show that Shakespeare was born in Stratford-upon-Avon in 1564, and married a woman called Anne Hathaway when he was aged just eighteen. Their first daughter Susanna was born the next year. Twins, a girl and a boy, called Judith and Hamnet, arrived in 1585. Hamnet died eleven years later but the cause of death is not recorded. Shakespeare’s father, John, was a glove maker. Later in his life Shakespeare bought a very large house for his family in Stratford, presumably using money from his successful theatre career in London. O’Farrell takes historical clues like these as the basis for her story of Shakespeare’s family life. She then adds elements from Shakespeare’s work and a lot of imagined details to fill the gaps.
hamnet/hamlet
So, how much did the death of Hamnet influence Shakespeare’s work? O’Farrell says she remembers learning at school that Shakespeare had lost a son called Hamnet and from that point on she became fascinated with imagining the boy’s story. Surely, she thought, the fact that Shakespeare gave the name of his dead son to his greatest tragic hero Hamlet was no coincidence? (Note that Hamnet and Hamlet are variant spellings of the same name.) Through the novel Hamnet, O’Farrell tries to imagine William Shakespeare as a father affected by the death of his son, rather than the literary icon we usually think of.
LIFE IN LITERATURE
In a presentation for her book, Maggie O’Farrell described how she built up a picture of Hamnet Shakespeare and his family from the limited historical clues available to her. She began by looking at Shakespeare’s plays, but while she took care not to read too much into them, certain motifs did reappear, as she explains.
Maggie O’Farrell (English accent): I tried to be very careful when I was writing the novel not to read too much of Shakespeare’s life into his plays. You have to be circumspect about that because life and work are two different things. But I could not ignore the repeated motif in Shakespeare’s plays of boy and girl twins. And the fact that he writes, for example in Twelfth Night, there are boy and girl twins featured there who look exactly the same. And they are separated, and they both think the other one is dead. And they get constantly mistaken for each other. And it’s this whole sort of comedy about mistaken identity. And then, towards the end, they find each other again. And it’s so heartbreaking when you read that with the idea that he had boy and girl twins who were separated by death and of course never saw each other again.
HOMETOWN DRAMA
Biographies of Shakespeare usually focus on his life in London. But O’Farrell concentrates instead on what was happening in Stratford-upon-Avon, the rural town where Shakespeare’s family lived. She explains why.
Maggie O’Farrell: It’s always seemed to me that the biggest drama in Shakespeare’s actual life happened offstage. And that’s back in Stratford, and that’s the death of his son. So I wanted to focus on the story that hasn’t really been told yet. The story that I feel has been overlooked. That Hamnet has been ignored. But if Hamnet has been ignored, I think his wife, she’s been worse than ignored in a way.
NO EVIDENCE
Little is known of Shakespeare’s wife Anne Hathaway, except that just before Shakespeare died, he wrote a will that gave her his “second best bed”. It doesn’t sound like a generous gift to a partner and many scholars have used this evidence to suggest that Shakespeare didn’t love his wife. But O’Farrell disagrees.
Maggie O’Farrell: We are only told one narrative about her and that is that she was a peasant, that he hated her, that he regretted his marriage, that she tricked him into marriage, she was this conniving… I’ve read really respected, excellent scholars, say things like: she had very loose morals, she was ugly, he hated her, he had to run away to London to get away from her. And I have never, in all the research I did for the book, I’ve never seen a single shred of evidence for that.
IN HIS FOOTSTEPS
As well as researching the written records, O’Farrell visited places in Stratford in search of clues to Shakespeare’s family life.
Maggie O’Farrell: Shakespeare’s very mysterious, we only have six examples of his signature. But, at the same time, if you go to Stratford and you buy a ticket, you can walk into the house where he grew up. You can stand in the room where he ate his dinner, you can stand in the bedroom that he shared with his brothers. You walk into the room where he was born. And it seems astonishing that that house still exists.
SPELLING
Spelling in the time of Shakespeare was unstable. Hamnet and Hamlet were variants of exactly the same name. Six examples of William Shakespeare’s own signature still exist and the spelling differs in all of them! The variants include: Shakspeare, Shakspere, and Shaksper. O’Farrell also found evidence that Shakespeare’s wife Anne Hathaway was really called Agnes. “It was a gift as a novelist,” she says, “not only can I reinvent her and ask people to see her anew but I can give her back her birth name.”